I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about six years. One of my four mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure.You can follow along, if you want...

Monday, June 24, 2013

Kill of the Week: Let's go mining

Know what Machariels are really good at? Hint: it's not mining. Now I'm not gonna say I've never flown a mining battleship because... ummm... thatwouldbealie. ::coughs:: I know I'm a care bear. Shut up. But I did it in a nice conservative mining Rokh. At one time it did the job well enough, particularly if you swept up small rocks in the wakes of three or four mining barges. At that time it was a better miner than a Retriever, took almost no mining skills to train up to, allowed combat pilots to help in a big mining op, and provided some additional drone DPS to clear rats.

But you didn't use a Machariel to do it. And you certainly didn't use a Machariel to mine high-sec scrap minerals. In my opinion, this awox was perfectly justified.

EDIT (25/Jun/2013): Duh, this Machariel didn't die in null-sec as I originally reported. I regret the error.

Honorable mention goes to this little ball of amusement. What's a man to do when he's -8.7 sec status and there are sec status tags for sale in Jita? What is he to do if he wants to repair his sec status with said tags? Go to a high-sec market system himself, of course. Buy the tags he needs, load them into a noob ship and set a course for the closest low-sec CONCORD station where he can turn them in-- wait, why is everyone locking me?

Fight of the week was the latest brawl between TEST and Goons. TMC has the full story on this one, and you can basically call it Asakai Mark II in the sense that it was completely unintended. A TEST titan, usually a bit cheeky, misjudged his jump distance, decloaked when he shouldn't have, and got himself tackled by Black Legion. From there, Goons managed to take over the tackle on the titan and called in their dread fleet, which immediately knocked TiDi down to 10%. Though this sometimes causes TiDi in other close by systems, sometimes a funny thing happens to the rest of the universe when TiDi drops so low: nothing at all. That meant that while 3ZTV-V, the system with the titan, was 10% TiDi'ed, surrounding systems were not which allowed more and more and more TEST and PL reinforcements to come in and turn what was supposed to be a super gank into a super brawl.

Not intending for this to happen and with no real contingency, the Goons came out on the losing side in a big way, dropping 30-odd capital ships on the floor. Whoops! And the TEST titan didn't die. Double whoops! That brings us to...

Number of dead super-caps last week: 1

That's right. Just one this past week, this mostly travel-fit Kadeshi Hel killed in Aridia by Pandemic Legion. It's a fairly safe bet that this Hel was on its way to Fountain to help out N3... who are technically kinda on PL's side? I think? It's so hard to tell with PL. But if that was the case, apparently the diplomats hadn't quite settled it yet. One of the comments:

That Hel kill gets better. Clearly frustrated by his dead super cap, he played station games with Brave Newbies Inc. in his Nid, along with a couple of buddies. Went into triage to save them, and then the neuting Geddons undocked...

Just like to explain a little about that Hel kill from what I've heard as a Nulli Secunda grunt. I don't claim this to be 100% accurate, it is simply what I've heard in Alliance/Coaliation channels.

Karan is TEST's staging system, which is also staged in by the Kadeshi, who are indeed blue TEST. However, according to PL, they were unaware at the time that the Kadeshi were blue to TEST, and PL/Kadeshi are not obviously not blue to each other.

I've heard conflicting accounts of what happened next, some claim the Hel was derping around on the staging station when PL dropped by and decided to kill it, and others say the Hel cynoed in at a supercap POS in Karan and got nailed by PL who saw a neutral Hel outside POS shields and thought "Wololol".

Either way, it was the source of much trolling towards the Kadeshi among N3.

"But you didn't use a Machariel to do it. And you certainly didn't use a Machariel to do it in null-sec. And you certainly didn't use a Machariel to mine high-sec scrap minerals in null-sec. In my opinion, this awox was perfectly justified."

The Machariel awox kill was in a 0.8 highsec system, and the rookie ship kill was in Amarr, not Jita. I've never known you to make 2 dumb mistakes in one post before, Jester. What's up? CSM driving you to drink already?

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